


Apocalypse Girl

by Twitchiest



Series: Apocalypse Girl [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Apocalypse, Dark, F/M, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Present Tense, Prison, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-17
Packaged: 2018-04-15 07:00:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4597227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twitchiest/pseuds/Twitchiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It begins like this: she delivers a package for a workmate. </p><p>It ends like this: she presses the button.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apocalypse Girl

**_One_**  
  
It begins like this: she delivers a package for a workmate, before lunch.  
  
The package is a long, thin tube. She has her bag on one shoulder and the tube under her arm as she swipes through doors and walks down white, cold corridors.  
  
She can't find the man so she leaves the package on his desk and leaves, thinking about where to eat. When she comes back, security is everywhere. They're asking about her. She asks why. She is told the package had a bomb in it, and they need to question her.  
  
She is innocent. She goes willingly.  
  
**_Two_**  
  
It ends like this: she presses the button.  
  
Her old workplace is abandoned. She swipes through with a stolen ID. She goes down to the lowest basement, footsteps echoing on metal steps in cramped stairwells, down low-ceiling passageways in dim light.  
  
She swipes one last time, and she closes the door behind her.  
  
She sits in a chair in the middle of a room full of screens. There is a button in front of her, and a number pad. The man who sat here before is dead. She enters the codes she took from him. Leans forward.  
  
Presses the button.  
  
**_Three_**  
  
Security didn't question her. They picked her up and put her in a van, and drove. When she asks why, they bark questions at her. Who was she working with? If she gave them names, she'd be released.  
  
She can only say the truth.  
  
They beat her. She can still only say the truth.  
  
She's pulled out and walked into the shadow of a grey building, forced to change into a black jumpsuit, and pushed into a cell.  
  
The door slams behind her.  
  
She sits down on the bed, aching, and knows someone has wronged her. She cries herself to sleep.  
  
**_Four_**  
  
When she wakes, there's food on a tray. She eats. She drinks. She waits.  
  
There is no sunlight, no way to track time. Food comes, footsteps echo outside. Her bruises begin to fade. She curls up on the bed and waits.  
  
And waits.  
  
She is woken by men dragging her off the bed, putting a bag over her head. She's too weak to fight them. They walk her a long, long way.  
  
Someone says, "Poor bitch," and pushes her forward. A gate slams. She is alone. She pulls the bag off and looks around.  
  
She sees space. She sees people.  
  
**_Five_**  
  
Someone older, with a pitying look, hears her story. He tells her she's in the Pit, a jail for people who disappear. She sits with him on a concrete wall, clutching the bag, watching worn people walk, and talk, and avoid the attention of men and women in twos and threes, with weapons.  
  
They're the gang that rules here, he explains. This isn't a place for a young woman, he explains.  
  
She's thinner than she used to be. She wants her home, her music, her friends. She's innocent.  
  
Maybe we could strike a deal, he says. I can protect you.  
  
**_Six_**  
  
He wants sex.  
  
She's not surprised.  
  
He takes her back to a room with a lockable door. He keeps the key on a string around his neck, and kisses her, and it is not a bad kiss. He is not a bad lover. He whispers something into her ear in a language she doesn't know, and holds her after.  
  
She lays in the dimness of his room, his arms around her, and thinks: someone will come for me. Someone will come. I'm innocent.  
  
She thought that in the cell. No one came.  
  
She sleeps, for a while, and doesn't dream.  
  
**_Seven_**  
  
The Pit is a maze of corridors and large rooms, some six floors down and sprawling in width. The man shows her around. He told her his name, but she doesn't want to remember it. Someone, a guard, in an armour-plated booth to the outside world, gives her a card. If she swipes at a dispenser, she will get food.  
  
She listens and learns in silence. The man talks. He likes to talk.  
  
She asks him to teach her his other language. He smiles. He arranges for her to work with his friends.  
  
She smiles and nods and says nothing.  
  
**_Eight_**  
  
If she works, sorting through piles of dumped rubbish at the far end of the prison, she gets more food than the dispenser will provide. The dispenser provides meagre, starvation rations. She works.  
  
She picks through the rubbish, and she gets thinner. She is summoned to wash once a week, and does so under the gaze of armed guards, under a shower, surrounded by men and women.  
  
The water is cold. Cold is freeing.  
  
Like everyone else on her team, she's searched after her work. A thick-set man does the searching. He looks through her.  
  
In her mind, she plans.  
  
**_Nine_**  
  
She exists in a state of dull survival until the day the man sells her for a favour.  
  
He takes her to another room, where another man stays. This new one has half-ruined furniture. Her man tells her to stay with him and leaves.  
  
The new man fucks her on the floor, next to a padded chair. She has grown wise, and does not fight. She pretends she wants it.  
  
After, she looks under the chair so she doesn't have to look at him, and sees a knife strapped to the leg. She reaches out and takes it. He doesn't notice.  
  
**_Ten_**  
  
There are two dead men in the prison before the day ends, and she still makes it in time for her work shift.  
  
Word spreads fast.  
  
Whilst the others avoid her, she remembers watching a man die in his own padded chair. She remembers the feeling of walking back to her man's room with the knife in her hand, untouched, avoided. She remembers dragging his body into the hallway and spitting on it.  
  
Her knife is tied to her leg, wrapped in ripped black cloth, safe.  
  
She feels an emotion, and it burns like fire inside her. Warm. Strong. Powerful.  
  
**_Eleven_**  
  
She starts approaching the new people.  
  
She avoids the ones the gang take immediately, but the poor waifs, the innocent, no one else wants. She teaches them what she knows, befriends them, is honest with them, and they find their places in the Pit, and they always remember she helped them.  
  
She kills three more men that want her, and no one tries to sleep with her after that.  
  
One of them, the thirteenth she helps, is her workmate. He doesn't recognise her, not even after she gives her name.  
  
She smiles, hatred burning hotter than ever, and helps him.  
  
**_Twelve_**  
  
He's a resistance fighter. He fought the government. He calls them tyrannical.  
  
She never thought the government tyrannical, but she was innocent, and the guards knew it, and they still threw her in the Pit.  
  
He tells her when he was captured, and she knows she's been here more than two years. He says the government is cracking down harder. He says that his friends are coming to help him.  
  
She smiles and says nothing.  
  
He causes trouble, always. He gets in fights. He tries to do the right thing, and she watches, and she tends his wounds with care.  
  
**_Thirteen_**  
  
He tells her when his friends are coming. When the time comes he goes to meet them, and she follows. He has promised her that he will save her too.  
  
She knows better.  
  
She holds him back from going to greet them, and he doesn't get caught when the guards come from nowhere and start shooting. He sobs as she pulls him away, and he doesn't fight her. When they're in her room, her safe space, she locks the door and leans her forehead against it.  
  
She has a plan. She has an idea. She will find her way free.  
  
_**Fourteen**_  
  
He denies. He sobs. He says, "I should have helped!"  
  
She sits on the other side of the bed, tired of his repetition. She snaps, "You never helped me!"  
  
His face is red, tired, eyes wide. She's surprised him.  
  
"They're dead because you didn't help them," she tells him, voice rising. "I'm dead because you never helped me! No one comes for you, here. No one."  
  
He chokes out another denial, but there is recognition in his face. She goes to leave. He catches her, holds her, whispers trembling hope in her ear.  
  
She fakes tears, and he believes it.  
  
**_Fifteen_**  
  
He's a smart man. She fed him information, in careful doses, and he thinks her plan is his own.  
  
They don't need to escape. They need chaos. There are hundreds, close to a thousand, people in the sprawl of the Pit, and they could be chaos embodied.  
  
She lets him bring it to the gang's leader. Tred is his name. Tred is prison-wise, too, and watches her as her old workmate tells him.  
  
She nods. He nods back.  
  
The steps are clear, simple, and freedom is a strong lure. She lists what they will need, in order. He nods again.  
  
**_Sixteen_**  
  
Tred gets them more food than they had before. She begins to put on weight. One night, her feigned softening to him works so well that her old workmate kisses her; she tastes love, in that, and hates him, and pulls him down onto the bed where they have slept together but not yet fucked, and lets him give her the only happiness anyone can have, in the Pit.  
  
She will burn him. She will destroy him. But she will use him, first, because he used her, because he dares to keep the hope, the faith, she lost years ago.  
  
**_Seventeen_**  
  
"You never knew what we did," he says.  
  
She shrugs.  
  
"At work." His head on her shoulder, warm, trusting. Hand on her hip. She is thin, but no longer bone-thin; wiry, sinewy. She leans into the hold.  
  
"If you'd known, I wouldn't have had to lie to you. It's all a cover. Under the building is a military base. They can control all the missiles in the country from there."  
  
All the missiles in the country. Hatred sparks hotter. "All of them?" she says. "Don't be ridiculous."  
  
"All of them," he promises, fingers tracing patterns on her skin. "I swear."  
  
**_Eighteen_**  
  
She doesn't work in rubbish sorting. She enforces for Tred, and people are afraid of her. Her workmate, lover, is kept too busy building things out of wires and metal to notice.  
  
They want the codes to open the doors, but first they need a distraction.  
  
She has twelve other people devotedly loyal to her, and they help others, and others become loyal to her, and they tell her everything they know. She has another plan, and hate burning like a forest fire inside her being, her expanding network of people follow her willingly.  
  
Was power always so easily given?  
  
**_Nineteen_**  
  
She learns what can be taught to her. Her lover teaches her how to make a bomb; one of Tred's men shows her how to play with wires in the wall, to tame and bend and use electricity. A thin, tired woman teaches her how to steal in return for someone's death.  
  
Her lover says, once, "With this many fighters, the resistance has to win."  
  
She smiles. They will not win. They will be cut down, or rampage through the city above them, and they will die.  
  
That's fine. They'll have served their purpose. She doesn't need them after that.  
  
**_Twenty_**  
  
It takes another year before Tred starts his assault.  
  
When the hidden doors swing open and the guards flood out, she volunteers to slip past them and into the halls below. He agrees. She's a good choice. She's fast on her feet, and quiet, and though she has to silence someone before she's done, she finds the codes and opens all the doors.  
  
She goes to meet her twelve most loyal, and her lover, and she looks upon them, and she says, soft, "Kill him."  
  
"What?" he says. "No. Please, I love -"  
  
He sent her here. He will never leave.  
  
_**Twenty One**_  
  
She is leader of twelve when they escape onto the streets. The riot is already begun. Most of the prisoners surviving are wearing the guard's armour, holding their guns. She finds a path through narrow alleys to the abandoned edge of the city, stealing clothes and food before stopping at the empty, ghostly, city gate.  
  
"Leave," she tells them. "You're free. Find a deep hole and hide in it."  
  
They don't question her. They go. She turns back.  
  
She changes a ragged prison jumpsuit for worn clothes, and becomes just another of the homeless and forgotten, the broken and unloved.  
  
**_Twenty Two_**  
  
It's not hard to manipulate people outside the prison, either.  
  
Social workers come around the homeless sometimes. She charms one. A woman, this time. In a few months she's off the streets and in a sheltered home. Then she gets lucky. A military man tours the home as a public relations stunt. She avoids his eyes, coy, when he shakes her hand, but drifts towards him in the party after.  
  
He laughs and calls her shameless, but he says it in her bed. In three weeks, she's asleep, pretty as a penny, in his. The pillows are softer than dreaming.  
  
**_Twenty Three_**  
  
A colonel's mistress gets privileges.  
  
A colonel's mistress with quick hands and quicker eyes can steal her way to the information she needs.  
  
He is not with her often - he has a wife, after all - but his wife is not allowed into the base and she is, because he wants her naked on his desk. From there, with some trickery, she finds that her lover told the truth. The missile control centre is under the cold, white building she used to work in, under this very city that she has never yet left.  
  
She makes the logical step. She joins the resistance.  
  
**_Twenty Four_**  
  
Within three months, she is not a colonel's mistress. When she got caught and fled, the resistance took her in, and a hard-eyed woman with a knife - and she still carries the same knife - is a weapon, to them. In their ranks, performing their darker missions, she can manipulate information. Start rumours. Twist truths.  
  
She waits until she has all the information she needs, and on that day she starts another riot. It works. The resistance scrambles to keep up. She disappears again.  
  
A person will tell you anything, if they believe she'll stop cutting them. That it'll help them survive her.  
  
**_Twenty Five_**  
  
Deep in a room under a building, she watches numbers on screens. Trajectories. Times to detonation. Warnings, alarms. A world burns.  
  
Footsteps echo in the hallways. She waits. They come closer. Someone opens the door, and they stop behind her.  
  
She doesn't move. She doesn't even have hatred left.  
  
A man says, "What have you done?"  
  
She blinks, and spins.  
  
His nose is crooked, and he has a gun. "You survived," she says.  
  
"No thanks to you," her lover says.  
  
"Come here," she says, and when he bends down, she pulls him into a kiss.  
  
He lets the gun fall.  
  
**_Twenty Six_**  
  
The next day, she starts to pack. There's military grade equipment here, and as long as there's power she can access all of it. When he realises, he grabs her and pushes her against the wall, one hand at her throat, gun barrel pressed against her head. She stares up at him  and closes her eyes.  
  
Slowly, he lets go. His breath hitches. He's crying.  
  
She leaves that night, with bag of supplies and weapons, wearing military armour, with him two steps behind her. She stands in the doorway and stares out at a city wrecked and ruined.  
  
She smiles.


End file.
